Narrativizing what cannot be told: The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun as a liminal trauma narrative

ABSTRACT

This article examines The Sand Child (L’enfant de sable) by Tahar Ben Jelloun as a liminal trauma narrative. The novel is discussed as an attempt to narrativize trauma. Although trauma resists narrativization, it is in these manifestations of failure that the essence of the narrative is sought. Its liminality (fragmentation, openness, intertextuality, and inconclusiveness) results from Ben Jelloun’s intention to convey the difficulties of expressing a trauma. Thus, the oral context of the novel’s communicative situation, the rivalry of raconteurs (narrators), is described as a hypoleptic practice that results in commoning; that is, creating a community of storytellers and listeners/readers. The article also rethinks the relationship between text and reader through trauma theory to highlight the ethical responsibility of a reader who bears witness to a protagonist’s trauma. The protagonist’s reluctance to work through the trauma is regarded as a manifestation of resistance to cultural expectations, especially gender role models.

KEYWORDS:

• Liminal trauma narrative
• trauma
• Tahar Ben Jelloun
• storytelling
• commoning
• The Sand Child

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The omniscient narrator only occasionally reveals their existence to give a voice to other storytellers. Aparna Halpe (2005) emphasizes that this construct almost every time “escapes the reader” (415), being muffled by other storytellers.

2. Prayer rugs are a means of territorializing prayer as they are “creating a material boundary between the sacred and the profane” (Moallem 2014), meaning that a pattern presented on a carpet acquires a sacred value and should not distract the praying person. The images on prayer rugs have a symbolic meaning and are designed in the form of mihrab, a prayer niche or an arched doorway facing Mecca. Other ornaments are mostly geometric, architectural, and floral, but should not represent animated characters.

3. “Commoning” refers to the use of the “commons”; that is, goods belonging to the entire community (e.g. land, wood, plants, water; Buck 1998). It is of particular relevance to forms of oral storytelling that, as in The Sand Child, aim at a communal process of narrativizing trauma.

4. One example of not working through trauma may be resignation from acting according to the grief scheme in the face of the death of a loved one; see Despret (2017).

5. This variant of decolonial language based on rebellion, violence, masculinity, and difference is found in the representative narrative voices of Salem and Amar. Lisa Lowe’s (1993, 57–59) widely held interpretation is that these narratives (including Fatuma’s) are allegories of possible attitudes of the decolonial period.

Additional information

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Izabela Poręba

Izabela Poręba has an MA in Polish literature and digital and network publishing and is a PhD candidate at the University of Wrocław, working on postcolonial writing strategies. She is an affiliate editor of the open-access journal Praktyka Teoretyczna. Her latest research is published in Homo Ludens, The Polish Journal of the Arts and Culture; the Academic Journal of Modern Philology; Toruńskie Studia Bibliologiczne; and Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne.